The
Basque Republic, commonly known as the
Basque Country,
Vasconia or
Navarre, is a member state of the European Union located on the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe. It is located in the western Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, bordered by the Kingdom of the French to the northeast, Catalonia to the east, and the Kingdom of Castile to the southwest. The country is a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic, with its capital in Pamplona, divided into seven provinces spanning an area of 20,494 square kilometres (7,913 sq mi) and a total population of over 3 million.
Inhabited since the Palaeolithic era, Basque tribes were known to Ancient Greek and Roman writers, including the Vascones, the Aquitani and others. Roman expansion reached the region in the 2nd century BCE, although it would take until 65 BCE for most of the local tribes to be completely subjugated by the Romans, and Roman rule was not consolidated until the time of Emperor Augustus. Romanisation was limited in the Basque lands, and the lax control allowed the Basques to retain their traditional laws, leadership and language. During the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Basque region escaped Roman control at some point in the late 4th or early 5th century. Up to the 9th century, the Basque region, known as "Vasconia", was embroiled in numerous conflicts with the Franks to the north and the Iberian Visigoths to the south. In 824, the Kingdom of Pamplona, later Navarre, was founded, although by the turn of the millennium the regions had fragmented into a myriad of smaller states. Technically a vassal state of Córdoba, the kingdom was able to expand briefly until the 11th century, after which a series of partitions led to a reduction of its territory and the loss of direct access to the ocean.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Basque Country was ravaged by bitter partisan wars between noble families and dynastic disputes with the neighbouring Crown of Aragon. In 1512, the southern part of the kingdom was conquered by Ferdinand the Catholic, which was recognised by the Treaty of Cambrai of 1529, while the part of the kingdom north of the Pyrenees remained independent. The southern part was annexed to the Crown of Castile. In 1589, the kingdom was again joined with France in personal union when Henry III inherited the French throne as Henri IV, and by 1620 it was largely absorbed into the Kingdom of France, marking the end of an independent Basque state. The Basque region would remain divided under French and Spanish control until 1814. Self-government in the region was gradually eroded by successive absolutist French and Spanish monarchs, more so in the north Basque Country than in the southern districts. The French Revolution centralised the government of France, abolished the special powers that the Northern Basque Country had enjoyed for centuries, and pursued the dissolution of the Basque identity into the new French nation. At the Congress of Vienna, the restored Bourbons in Spain were granted the northern Basque territories, ceded from France in perpetuity, marking the first time in three centuries that the entire Basque Country was united under a single monarch.
Fearing that they would lose their historic self-government under a liberal Spanish constitution, many Basques sided with the traditionalists during the Legitimist Wars that ravaged Spain in the 19th century. Despite the defeat of the legitimist forces in the first war, the Basque Country was able to retain a set of important prerogatives. During the Spanish Revolution of the 1860s, the Basques were one of the first regions to openly side with the republicans, although the First Spanish Republic that emerged from conflict attempted to undermine the Basque Country's separate status. Theses tensions culminated in the Third Legitimist War (1872-1876), with most of the Basque territories forming a
de facto independent state under the Legitimist claimant, Roberto of Parma. The victory of the Republic over the Legitimists led to the loss of nominal Basque sovereignty, with the districts assimilated into Spanish provinces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Basque Country began to industrialise, drawing Spanish-speaking migrants from the rest of the country that threatened the relatively homogeneous Basque-speaking region. The outbreak of the First World War, in which Spain remained neutral, was a boost to Basque industrialisation, as steel production and export expanded due to the demands of the war effort.
During the interwar period, attempts were made to draw up a statute for the granting of self-government to the Basque Country as a whole, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War curtailed those efforts. In July 1936, a military uprising erupted across Spain, in the face of which the Basque Country was divided. The Basque nationalist movement was divided, with many siding with the Spanish republicans, while Navarre supported General Francisco Franco's insurgent forces. Numerous atrocities were committed against the Basques during the war, most notably the German bombing of Gernika. With the end of the civil war, and Franco's drive to establish a totalitarian nation state, many Basques fled into exile, including the soldiers of the
Eusko Gudarostea, who went first to France, and later to Britain to fight with Allies during the Second World War. Francoist Spain enacted harsh laws against minorities, aiming to wipe out their cultures and languages. After Francoist Spain's defeat in the Second World War, the Basque territories were occupied by France as part of their occupation zone, and came under French administration, as the Basque Protectorate. Internally self-governing since its creation, the last vestiges of French military control and administration ended on 15 December 1957, with the formal establishment of the "Basque Republic", the first independent Basque state in nearly five hundred years.
On 1 January 1958, the Basque Republic became a founding member of the European Economic Community. Over the decades the country has remained a close French ally, and one of the most integrated members of the European Union, as part of both the Eurozone and the European Defence Organisation, as well as an observer at La Francophonie. The economy of the country is highly developed, with a high gross domestic product, and since the decline of the traditional steel and shipbuilding industries in the 1980s the services and tourism sectors have grown. Today, the country's economy is dominated by machine tool, aeronautics and the energy sector.